3 Ups & 5 Downs From Last Night's WWE SmackDown (June 6)

4. 50/50 Booking Strikes Again

Dolph Ziggler scored his biggest win in months (perhaps even years) by pinning AJ Styles, the consensus best wrestler in the company, last week. It was a huge shock: Dolph hasn’t been treated with any real credibility since his feud with The Miz, while AJ is rightly pushed as the brand’s biggest star, and rarely drops pinfalls in random singles matches.

It was a decent bout with a questionable outcome, but last night rendered it entirely pointless. The duo met in a shorter rematch, with Styles recovering his loss following a clean victory over ‘The Showoff,’ destroying any momentum Ziggler may have built from the previous week in the process.

There’s a strong argument to be made that Dolph should never have beaten AJ in the first place, but the insistence on immediately removing that win’s significance is maddening. Defeating Styles should be treated like a big deal, but it has now come to nought, and Ziggler is exactly where he was a couple of weeks ago. Such 50/50 booking is a huge factor in WWE’s complete inability to create new stars, as whenever someone scores a big win, their momentum is always crushed within a week or two.